Syracuse makes real lava in parking lot for kicks (and science)

This video is slightly more impressive than your kid’s science fair volcano.

Geology typically requires a suspension of our everyday sense of time to be appreciated. If you stare at a rock for a minute or two, you’re unlikely to be rewarded with much action—unless you throw it. But that doesn’t do it for everybody.

What does do it for just about everybody is volcanoes. Big, violent volcanoes. Angry mountains spewing their molten guts high into the atmosphere, with fiery blobs and bits flying everywhere. Of course, such sights are preferably taken in through the comforting insulation of a television set—even a relatively calm volcano like Hawaii’s Kilauea demands serious precaution.

But what if you could get up close and personal with a real-life, mesmerizing lava flow—minus the imminent personal danger? A recent story in Earth Magazine describes a project at Syracuse University that results in on-demand lava flows in a college parking lot. Crushed basalt is melted in a specialized furnace, and the resultant lava is poured out for all to enjoy. Volcanologists get to study flows in controlled conditions, and the public gets to freak out about how cool it is. (OK, the volcanologists surely do that, too.)

Ironically, the crushed basalt comes all the way from the failed rift responsible for Lake Superior rather than the relatively nearby (successful) rift that formed the Palisades along the Hudson River. Given that the Palisades basalt is about 200 million years old, this is the closest thing to volcanism that the piece of the North American plate we now call New York has seen in a very long time.

A dose of hot basalt

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A celebration of Cassini

A celebration of Cassini

A celebration of Cassini

Nearly 20 years ago, the Cassini-Huygens mission was launched and the spacecraft has spent the last 13 years orbiting Saturn. Cassini burned up in Saturn's atmosphere, and left an amazing legacy.

Who wants to build a small replica city then have this poured over it? No research or anything, just to do?

*raises hand* oooh oooh mista Kotter me me.

That would be so much fun. Fill it with Gi Joe action figures and relive my childhood. (Although I was upset to learn that hairspray and gasoline do not have quite the same effect as napalm)

green army men would do, loads cheaper. i'm a veteran of many campfire wars.

Yea, me too. Filled a sandbox with Twenty-five dollars worth of Green and Tan army men and melted them into a large sand/plastic conglomerate. I just found GI Joe guys more satisfying. And I had a lot of them by the time I finally grew bored enough of them to introduce them to fire.

I've been to enough foundry pours thru the years to not be that impressed.

Ditto here. Although I'm surprised there wasn't more of a reaction from the ice - the thought of molten ANYTHING onto solid or liquid water would be enough to get me running the other way. Is it just the temperature difference between molten basalt and steel/slag (~1370°C vs 1650°C) or is the relative viscosity playing a part? Steelmaking slags are usually 'creamy' or 'clumpy', being high in lime and MgO, basalt I reckon would be glassy (high in silica) and liquid steel flows like water.